Famous scientists such as Richard Dawkins offer meaning for a post-religious age, writes Tim Radford
RICHARD DAWKINS is nervous. This is very surprising. After all, he has done his homework: the topic for the evening is called “Arguments by Design”, a knowing play on the twist of natural philosophy that led indirectly to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is a subject that Professor Dawkins really does know a lot about. He wrote the book; his household is probably working on the T-shirt.
On top of that he has a number of confidence- bolstering things going for him: a brain the size of a small planet, a command of language that would make your average novelist squirm with envy, a chair at Oxford, and the fierce, hawkish good looks of a Forties film star.
He also has a gift for taking a single metaphor for a long walk through the Darwinian hinterland: check out titles like The Selfish Gene, River Out of Eden, The Blind Watchmaker, and his latest, Climbing Mount Improbable. His books sell, and sell. Every seat in the theatre is sold, and there is a small knot at the box office hoping for returns.
Returns! For a 6pm conversation at a literary festival in Brighton, a conversation about the trickier bits of Darwinism! All this, and the man is palpably and endearingly a bit nervous. The word is that he always is on edge at these things.
He need not have worried. When he speaks, the whole theatre strains forward to listen. When he stops talking, people seem to relax a little, as if to help them begin digesting the platefuls of pertinence washed down by beakers of brilliance.
He serves up dazzling stuff about the evolution of spiders’ webs, stunning entertainments about symbiosis in tropical reef systems, a glimpse of the surprisingly furious fisticuffs within the framework of Darwinism.
There are questions: the sharp, to-the-point questions of people who have been listening carefully: what is the difference, asks one, between symbiosis and parasitism? Ninety minutes fly by.
When it is over, the applause explodes, and goes on until Dawkins leaves the stage. Almost immediately, the other ritual of a literary festival begins: people start queuing to buy copies of his books and have them signed by him.
The begetter of a literary magazine says that the evening was well spent. “It was like watching the start of a new religion or something,” he says. Or maybe just a cult.
All over the place, there are gatherings of people gazing reverently at scientists, some of them almost levitating in fervour. In a recent book, philosopher Daniel Dennett announced that “if I were to give an award for the best single idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else”.
By “everyone else” he meant, it seems, Jesus, Socrates, Goethe, Homer – you know, those guys. Is it just a fad?Science replaces comedy/poetry/you-name-it as the new rock’n’roll? Or is it because the lads in the lab now have something amazing to say, and say it amazingly well?
Sir David Attenborough has been a star for so long it’s easy to forget he thinks of himself as a zoologist. It isn’t just the biologists. The physicists, too, are heading for stardom. In Australia, author and theoretical physicist Paul Davies draws 1 200 people at a time to a lecture. In the US, Carl Sagan, the astronomer, has been on the television chat show circuit for decades.
Fame beckons everywhere. Talking of which, Stephen Hawking must be, after Einstein, the century’s best-known physicist: he has been filling lecture halls for eight years. He just keeps expanding, like the cosmos, into ever bigger spaces. The last extravaganza choked the Albert Hall.
Dawkins is quite used to being a sell-out. “I find it very gratifying, that there does seem to be a group of people who are literate, and who just flock to science events,” he says.
That is his job these days. He is called the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. This concept of public understanding is a new one. The scientific establishment dreamed it up a decade ago, when they discovered that (a) nobody knew what scientists were doing, (b) either nobody cared or they actually resented it, and (c) nobody wanted to learn science even at secondary school.
Dawkins notices “a curious dichotomy”. The questions he gets, and the letters from the people who read his books, are all immensely encouraging.
“On the other hand, you read figures about schoolchildren voting with their feet when it comes to deciding what to do at university, and flocking in droves away from science.”
This is because science is seen as a miserably paid and insecure way to make a living.
“That would explain why people might like to read law,” says Dawkins. “But why English? It’s wonderful to read English, but the very same people, for the very same motives, read English because they love literature and love beauty. Half of them could get that from science.”
Or maybe from reading books about science. The Dawkins phenomenon is newer than the thing publishers long ago learned to call “the Hawking effect” – that books about science really do sell if you push them.
The British have been reading elegantly written, graceful science for more than a century. Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, wrote essays that are still models of style. Albert Einstein’s champion Sir Arthur Eddington wrote beautifully about the far cosmos more than five decades ago. JBS Haldane introduced biology to The Daily Worker before World War II. He left a legacy of essays still in print, and one of the great lines -“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but it is queerer than we can suppose.”
After a period in which books about science went out of fashion, Stephen Jay Gould in the US and Hawking in Britain showed publishers a thing or two about sales and profits – and good reviews.
Nor is it surprising that science writing is consistent with good writing. Novelists depend on observation and description, but field biologists (for instance) mapping the 10-million, or 20-million, or 100-million distinct species on the planet really depend on observation and description.
This is one reason why, say, Edward O Wilson in his autobiography, Naturalist, writes stuff that makes the scalp prickle. Another reason is that clear writing and clear thinking are not separate skills: someone good at one tends to be good at the other, and physicists contemplating, say, the bizarre moment when time began, are likely to be good at thinking or they wouldn’t have the job at all.
If people are beginning to hang on to the words of scientists, it may also be because the words add up to an astounding story, a kind of cosmic cliffhanger, with new twists all the time.
Sometimes today’s new twists reveal that yesterday’s version of the story was wrong. Dawkins takes that calmly too. Lots of things in biology and physics have, in the past, proved to be wrong. But there are some certainties.
“We can say with absolute confidence that [the theory of] evolution is right, that DNA is a double helix – that’s not going to change, it is not going to be an approximation to some more profound truth we will get later on,” he says.
Paul Davies, the theoretical physicist based in Adelaide, has a string of successful books and a sometimes disconcerting celebrity status. He too is used to crowded audiences. He, like Dawkins, warns against scientism: the belief that a man in a white coat will adopt the priestly function and give you something new and sure to believe in.
Dawkins doesn’t care for the religion parallel at all: Davies accepts that it is there anyway. He too sees a real danger of treating science as a latter-day religion. It is not, he says. And scientists are not high priests with answers to the ethical and moral problems of society.
But, he says: “I believe that even in this post-religious age, ordinary people are still seeking for some deeper meaning to their lives, and they see science – correctly in my opinion – as providing a possible path to round out the context of their lives.”